Frederic Lardinois

Frederic has spent more than five years covering news and providing analysis about technology, the industry and consumer tech related to the Internet with potential to influence industry direction. At TechCrunch, his focus spans from emerging technologies and niche startups to major product advances by industry titans – all innovation focused. Before he joined TechCrunch in 2012, he founded Silicon Filter and wrote for ReadWriteWeb (now ReadWrite).

Latest from Frederic Lardinois

Amazon’s AWS cloud computing service hosted its annual NY Summit today and it used the event to launch a new service: Amazon Macie. The idea behind Macie is to use machine learning to help businesses protect their sensitive data in the cloud. Read More

Serverless applications are all the rage right now — and some companies are even leapfrogging containers to go all-in on services like AWS Lambda and Azure Functions. Unsurprisingly, these services are now spawning their own startup ecosystems. IOpipe, coming out of beta today, is an application operations platform (with a current focus on monitoring) for AWS’s pioneering… Read More

Microsoft today announced the launch of two new Azure regions in Australia. These two new regions will complement Microsoft’s existing two regions on the continent and bring the total number of global Azure regions to 42. The plan is for these new regions to go online in the first half of 2018.
Microsoft specifically notes that these two new regions will be certified to run both… Read More

Google’s Cloud Speech API, which has allowed developers to use Google’s services to transcribe spoken words into text since its launch in 2016, is getting a major update today.
The most interesting of these is probably the addition of support for 30 new languages on top of the 89 languages the service already understood (though, to be fair, Google includes multiple regional variants… Read More

Microsoft today announced a new version of Windows 10 that’s specifically geared toward professional users that use high-end hardware to support mission-critical workloads. As rumored, Windows 10 Pro for Workstations will feature Microsoft’s server-grade file system, support for persistent memory, faster file sharing with SMB Direct and support for high-end hardware. Read More

Backblaze is one of the few unlimited backup services standing — in part because of its prowess in securing its own hard drives and building its own cloud services. Today, the company launched version 5.0 of its service and desktop clients. This new version introduces faster backups and restores, as well as improved browsing speed, image previews on the restore page and a new file… Read More

Interest in blockchains is at an all-time high, but there are still plenty of technical issues to solve, especially for enterprises. For them, issues like throughput, latency, governance and confidentiality are still major stumbling blocks for using blockchains. With its new Coco Framework, Microsoft wants to solve these issues and make blockchains more suitable for the enterprise. Read More

Rumor is that Amazon’s AWS cloud computing platform will soon launch its own Kubernetes-based container management service. Those rumors are getting a bit more concrete because AWS today joined the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), the open-source home of the Kubernetes project, as a top-level Platinum member. Read More

Business intelligence and analytics firm Tableau today announced that it has acquired ClearGraph, a service that lets you query and visualize large amounts of business date through natural language queries. Tableau expects to integrate this technology with its own products as it looks to make it easier for its users to use similar queries to visualize their data. Read More

Microsoft is launching a new opt-in beta program for Outlook.com today that will give users access to a faster and more personalized email experience, as well as an overhauled design. Over the next few weeks, the Outlook.com team will roll out to all users a new toggle for opting into the beta. Those who don’t like the new look and feel can easily switch back to the old version. Read More

Pro.com started out as a marketplace that wanted to connect homeowners with home improvement and renovation professionals. Today, however, the company is a tech-centric general contractor with licenses in Washington state and California — and it’s also probably one of the best-funded general contractors. The company today announced that it has raised a $10 million growth… Read More

Remix 3D is Microsoft’s community site for sharing 3D models from Paint 3D and other 3D modeling tools. Given the company’s focus on mixed and virtual reality, it’s no surprise that the company wants to get people to think about building the kind of 3D models that bring these new experiences to life. The premise of Remix 3D, as the name implies, has always been that it’s… Read More

Heptio, the Seattle-based company recently launched by Kubernetes co-founders Craig McLuckie and Joe Beda, wants to make it easier for businesses to use Kubernetes in production. Since its launch in late 2016, the well-funded company has remained pretty quiet about its products, but today, the team released two open source projects into the wild: Ark and Sonobuoy.
While Kubernetes’… Read More

Assuming you haven’t been living in a cave — in which case this news wouldn’t interest you anyway — you know there’s a solar eclipse happening on August 21st. It’s the first solar eclipse to cross the United States since 1918 and the last one before 2045, so people are quite excited about this one. Science teachers are also getting ready to turn this into… Read More

Last November, GE acquired the AI-centric startup Wise.io to bolster its machine learning capabilities. While Wise.io’s core competency was in machine learning, its main product focused on helping enterprises manage customer service requests. GE has now spun out Wise.io in a new company, SmartAssist.io, which will continue to expand the service and work with existing customers. Read More

When you first look at Redkix, it looks like any other Slack clone, but while you could definitely use it just like Slack, the team offers an important twist on the standard company chat theme: it plays nice with email. After a year of private testing with about 7,000 users, the team is opening up its public beta today and launching its paid premium program in private beta.
Oudi Antebi… Read More

Firefox is due for a comeback. A lot of the work the team spent on refactoring core parts of the browser is starting to pay off, and, while its market share continues to decline (especially on the desktop), Firefox today feels faster and leaner than it has in a long time. And today is a good day to give Firefox a new try because the team just launched three new Test Pilot experiments that… Read More

Google today announced a small but important update to how Google Calendar and Microsoft Exchange can work together going forward.
It’s not unusual for a company to still use both Google’s G Suite tools and Microsoft Exchange in parallel, and with this update, G Suite admins can now allow their users to see real-time free/busy information across the two systems. This means tools… Read More

GitHub, the service that is still pretty much the de facto standard for managing source code, is suffering from a major outage today. Sometime around 9:30am PT this morning, users started to experience issues with the service and weren’t able to check in new code and make pull requests.
While the company first considered this to be a minor outage, it quickly upgraded the status to… Read More

In 10 years, when autonomous driving is mainstream, we’ll have a fundamentally different relationship with our cars and driving in general. Every major car company is fully aware of this, but not all are reacting to this change with the same degree of urgency. Earlier this month, BMW hosted its Innovation Days at its technology office in Chicago, where the company showcased the current… Read More